dude

1. Informal An Easterner or city person who vacations on a ranch in the West.

2. Informal A man who is very fancy or sharp in dress and demeanor.

3. Slang

   1. A man; a fellow.

   2. dudes Persons of either sex.

Our Living Language  : Cowboys and the Wild West are indelibly set in the minds of many as typical of America—an association borne out by several common Modern English words that originated in the speech of the 19th-century western United States. One is dude, now perhaps most familiar as a slang term with a wide range of uses (including use as an all-purpose interjection for expressing approval: "Dude!"). Originally it was applied to fancy-dressed city folk who went out west on vacation. In this usage it first appears in the 1870s. The origin of the word is not known, but a number of other cowboy terms were borrowed by early settlers from American Spanish. These include buckaroo, corral, lasso, mustang, ranch, rodeo, and stampede. Buckaroo, interestingly, is an example of a word borrowed twice: it is an Americanized form of Spanish vaquero, which also made it into English as vaquero, a cowboy.

1. n.
   a male friend; a guy. (Also a term of address. There is no evidence as to the origin of this term. The earliest uses refer to a male who is carefully and meticulously dressed. Some people derive dude from dud. See also dude up.) : Who's the dude with the cowboy boots?
2. mod.
   excellent. (See also dudical.) : The game was severely dude! We won!